Sleepless

She took the cellophane cap from one end, pulled out the tissue wrap, and unfolded it. Cager watched as she unwrapped and then rewrapped the dragon and put it in yet another pocket on her vest.

He turned his phone toward Park and displayed a string of numbers.

“This will be an adventure for you, Park. A quest.”

7/10/10

I UNDERSTAND.

He’s playing a game. Like Beenie said, taking his fantasy and putting it over this world. Trying to change it to fit what he wants it to be.

He showed me a number and waited to see if that would be enough, if I could figure it out. I recognized the format: 34/04/26-118/25-31. The fu

He thinks I’m sleepless. I’m not sleepless. Rose, I’m not sleepless. You don’t have to worry about that. I’m not acting like myself, but I’m not sleepless. I acted sleepless for Cager. I acted like I couldn’t remember the number. He took a pen from his bag and wrote it on my hand. “Don’t wash your hands,” he said.

He wanted to look at another room, one with more Chasm Tide characters, all created by sleepless. I couldn’t see any more of that stuff. I don’t have time anymore for anything else but what I have to do. I left and went to my car. I opened Google Earth on my laptop and zoomed on Los Angeles. Moving the cursor in sine waves, I tracked the numbers scrolling up and down at the bottom left of the screen. I found a match and zoomed in closer. Cager wasn’t lying; it is nearby.

Before shutting down, I co

Walden Drive was just around the corner. The fence ru

He didn’t care for golf particularly. He said, “Parker, there are some pursuits in life that one becomes proficient in for the sake of one’s profession, and for no other reason.” Golf was one of those pursuits. I think he appreciated the game itself; it was the gambling, cursing, and boozing that went along with it that he objected to.

I walked to the ninth green, to the strip of grass ru

Nothing.

I started over with the second hazard, got one negative, walked two yards, pulled the trigger again, and the screen flashed a positive result: ff688-6-2623-56.

I had to narrow it down, so I circled the trap, pulling the trigger every few steps. And found that just one-third of the bunker gave me a positive. I found a rake at the edge of the hazard, dug the tines in deep, and began to rake the sand east to west. I didn’t find anything, so I began raking north to south, crossing the marks I had already left. Occasionally I took a read with the interrogator to make sure I hadn’t moved anything without realizing it, but it remained consistent.

Finally I had to spin the head of the rake and use the little leveling plane to shave the sand away. I sank it to about an inch’s depth and pushed the sand into a pile and took a reading from the interrogator on the pile, then went back and did it again, working across the area where I got my first positive result. It took almost two hours. It was buried slightly less than a foot deep. Zipped into a plastic bag that had been double sealed with duct tape. I sat at the edge of the hazard and brushed damp sand from the bag and read the label on the bottle inside.

Afronzo-New Day0R33M3R

There are hundreds of global coordinates in the Afronzo, Parsifal, K. Jr. file on Hydo’s hard drive. Hundreds of bottles of Dreamer stashed from the Hollywood Hills down to Long Beach and from Santa Monica to Dodger Stadium.

Hydo said Dreamer was “in the air.”

Getting caught with DR33M3R with intent to sell carries mandatory federal time.

Stashing the bottles minimizes the amount of time anyone has them in their possession. Risk reduction. Deals are made for the coordinates, not for the bottles themselves. It’s safe. And like a game at the same time. Treasure hunting. Geo caching.

Busting anyone with this setup requires a snitch on the inside. Even then, you could only get a little. If Cager gave Hydo the franchise on selling the Dreamer, the arrests would stop with him and the guys at the farm, unless one of them talked.

And they were going to talk. Rose. They were killed because they were going to talk. Whoever was using me to make sure there were no leaks about this, they found out that Hydo was going to talk to someone or that he had threatened to talk to someone. Blackmail.

Or he might have been informing. He might have already been busted by the feds himself, may have started turning evidence. Whoever is protecting Cager, someone even higher up (national security?) could have arranged the attack on the gold farm. But they missed the drive. Or they didn’t know about the drive. How could they know about everything else and not know about the drive?

Too much. It’s too much for me. I’m not a detective. I never was. I’m a cop. I’m not supposed to be figuring out this kind of thing. I’m supposed to protect people. But something has happened. Afronzo-New Day has done something. People have been murdered.

No one will listen if I just try to tell them, no matter what evidence I have. I can only make them listen if they have no choice. If it’s too big not to listen. I can only make them listen if I arrest Cager.

It will be too big then. Too much noise. They will have to listen to what I say. And someone will do something about it. Someone will stop what is happening to us. It’s wrong. The world has gone wrong, Rose. Give me a little more time. I can do something to help. I can do something.

OUTSIDE OF THE LAPD self-defense classes, Park had studied at a tiny studio in South Gate. A strip mall storefront below a doughnut shop where old Thai men from the neighborhood hung out to play the lotto and buy strips of scratch tickets. It had been recommended to him by an older officer who had taken a look at his light build and suggested that he might want to heft up and get you to the Hurtin Man.

The Hurtin’ Man had turned out to be a former Latin Kings chapter president who taught a form of martial arts that he described as what we do on the inside when shit goes down. The basic philosophy of the fighting style was concerned with ending any conflict in the swiftest possible ma